Friday, February 19, 2016

Purisima creek hiking

The previous night Mr. Man had been continuously reminding me to set the alarm. We had a long drive to reach the hiking trail head where we should reach before eight o’clock in the morning. I didn’t even know how long and the difficulty level of the hike. I didn’t check the weather. In Bay Area, weather changes every moments, even 15-20 miles from home the whether could be drastically different.

Anyway, we could get up early that Saturday morning. We able to start early with my extremely unwilling son, who didn’t want to walk at all early in the morning. Keeping behind the freeway, when we entered the mountain road, I couldn’t make out how was the road. I didn’t understand whether the road was narrow or not, whether the cliff was gaping or not. Only thing I could see the dense white fog and the heads of the enormous conical trees through the cloud.

Somewhere, the fog was so dense that it was difficult to understand the exact path to drive. Anyway, as I’m too expert to tell the direction even with Google map in my hand, I always completely rely on Mr. Man for that. While he was driving, I saw the board of Purisima creek trailhead.

I didn’t tell him anything as he better knows the route. Since beginning he took care of checking the route, and he told that we are going to park our car at the trail head. We reached somewhere, which looked like turnout area, and he told that, that was the South parking area. However, we couldn’t see any of our hiking mates there. Though, we knew that they already reached the trailhead. Thankfully, the cell phone network was available , so he called other fellow hikers, and we came to know that we just missed the trailhead. Anyway, again turnaround and came to meet our fellow hiker. After exchanging greetings to each other we started our journey according to the map. The weather was very pleasant , not at all hot, rather a littler cooler than the our area. We started walking amid big redwood trees. Soon, the trail became so narrow, that no two person can walk side by side. One of our fellow hiker showed a distant place where we could see a little sunny area, and he told that we have to reach there to finish the very trail. There were numerous number of trails, we decided to go on one trail, while coming back we would take a different route.First we started down the slope. As we were going down the hike was easy. I understood that while coming it was going to tough, and we would be too tired to take any picture of the magnificent redwoods preserve. The trail was sometimes narrow, sometimes full of dirt, sometime little steep mound along with lush greenery on both sides. Redwoods provide shade and habitat for many banana slugs, as well as redwood sorrel, thimbleberry, huckleberry, hazelnut, stream violet, trillium, ferns, starflower, and many more.

The whether usually remained cool, still we started feeling hot as we were walking. The dense forest is the home of rattle snakes, mountain lions, rabbits and other creatures. We were unfortunate (rather fortunate) as we didn’t meet any of those creatures, only my son could see some little rabbits. As he shouted “bunny, bunny”,we lost the opportunity see those cute animals. Only we heard the rustle of their escape. As we were going down, one place we saw some redwood tree had grown in a circle and inside a circle there was a big hole. That made a nice view. Through the woods we could see a little creek and water was flowing ,who’s splashing sound came in a resonance in our ears. Almost at the end we cross a wooden bridge and reached the parking lot on the other side.

Then the real challenge began, when we started climbing up 4 miles with an elevation of 2000 ft. We took a different path, which was a narrow winding trail unlike the down road which was almost straight. Just in the beginning we rode a steep mound,which made me almost breathless, and the challenge began. The trail was so much twisted, that we had to finish a big ‘U’ to climb up a little every now and then. There we first met with the ‘Banana peel’, Those leeches were so big and so uncouth I felt like throwing up.

While we went down, we didn’t see a single leech.The trail we took while climbing down was the outside route, from where we could see the mystical fog drenched Half moon bay. But while climbing up we took a route, through the dense forest, and all those banana peels showed up their faces. Sometime those really gave me goose bump, specially when I thought about my kid, who was in shorts. After sometime my son became so tired, that he refused to move. We had been telling him that only one mile was left. But climbing up even one mile was way more hard. Lastly he was so tired and pissed off, he started crying loudly. Then my husband took him on his back and walked few steps, which boosted his energy. Then he started walking. We were so tired that, I felt that we couldn’t make it to the car park, when it was just few steps away.

The hiking sounds like quite a rigorous challenge and you did it. I was getting exhausted just reading your post and those big banana peel leeches are kind of repulsive creatures. You're so brave to go where there are rattle snakes. Those big trees are huge. Have a great day Krishna and thanks for your comment.JB

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Brought up to be a career oriented personality, happily gave up her growing career, for the sake of her family. Love to care everybody in her family. Love to cook various dishes for her foodie husband and love to travel. Her happiness lays on others’ happiness of her near and dear ones. She is a homemaker and proud to be so. Her favorite past-time was art and craft during her busy student-life and career as a software engineer became her passion after marriage. She doesn’t like to sit idle at any time. Her small and cozy home proves that. She is a woman, she is life.